Mr. Chairman, just for clarification, Minister Roland, Minister Bell and I met in Ottawa with the Deputy Prime Minister, the Minister of Finance, the Minister of DIAND and Minister of Northern Development. At that meeting, we did not talk about specific amounts of money. We talked about the fact that socioeconomic impacts are primarily government's responsibility, primarily our responsibility because those programs are within our mandate. But because we don't have resource revenue sharing, there is an obligation of the federal government to provide us with money to be

able to achieve our needs. They agreed with that. We didn't talk specific amounts of money because we wanted to talk to the aboriginal leaders first.

When we met in Calgary the following week, it was only with aboriginal leaders, not with the Deputy Prime Minister. At that time, we looked at what our estimate was for the GNWT of meeting socioeconomic needs. That was roughly $50 million on forced growth, mitigating impacts and the capital expenditures. We looked at what the asks were or the requests were from the aboriginal governments. It totalled up to an average of $100 million a year with some years in the initial periods being higher than later on because of the need to improve our capital infrastructure.

So the $100 million a year, until we have resource revenue sharing, was an estimate we worked out with aboriginal governments. We sent that to Ottawa. The federal Ministers have seen it and as we speak today, our officials are in touch with theirs about setting up a meeting. I am prepared to go to Ottawa any time a meeting is set up, whether it's tomorrow or the day after or the day after that, but I hope to have a meeting this week. My preference is to meet with the federal Ministers and aboriginal leaders. But if that can't be possible, I will do it again on my own and brief the leaders on why we are doing that, given the short time frame we have to work with.

But there is no commitment on the part of the federal government toward the $100 million. Our deputy ministers did meet with theirs last week and we will continue to rationalize and explain why we feel this amount is necessary. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.